Affiliate Social Media Marketing

How to Encourage Social Media Sharing for Your Website & Product

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. The words are so ubiquitous that they’ve become as much a part of our morning routines as vanilla lattes and commuter traffic. Heck, they’ve gotten so popular that social media now spans entire generations and continents.

That’s very good news if you have an affiliate program.

After all, affiliate marketing is all about finding new customers. And the popularity of social media in this day and age has all but assured that turning to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter will offer you and your affiliates countless opportunities to find new leads, new customers, and new opportunities.

Unfortunately, many people in charge of affiliate programs believe that they do have to be some sort of Facebook whiz or Twitter wizard, and as a result end up ignoring the platforms completely. Luckily, with how things are set up at LeadDyno, you don’t have to know very much at all about social media in order to get your affiliates up and running on the most popular platforms of today.

But in case you did want to first learn the terrain, here are a few “basics” about social media that you’ll want to keep in mind:

Social media works through “updates,” short little messages that you broadcast to everyone in your group. On Facebook, it’s a “status update.” On Twitter, it’s a “Tweet,” and so on. Basically all of the social media outlets utilize this medium to some extent.

Everyone on social media is used to seeing links. It’s 2014. That’s just the playing field. But if you can craft a social media update message that is unique and interesting, your affiliates will stand a much better chance at getting the clicks they’re after.

Social media is free, and completely easy to experiment on—so no worries if you don’t get it right at first.

Those are the basics. Sure, there are lots of ways to optimize your social media plans, and there are some genuine wizards out there who really know their stuff. But once you get set up with LeadDyno, you’ll learn that those essential facts are about all you need to know before you get started.

Getting Your Affiliates to Work on Social Media

Of course, as the affiliate program manager, you don’t have to actually do any of the work on social media—that will be up to your affiliates.

…and as you can tell, all of the social media embedding is built right in.

But there’s another concept to address here: incentivizing. Affiliates are human! They’re as susceptible to laziness as anyone else. So you want to give your affiliates a reason to utilize social media.

The quickest way to accomplish this is to do some of the work for them.

The good news is that doing this work only takes a one-time investment of your time: writing a basic, short script that your affiliates can then use in their own affiliate campaigns.

For example, an email referral template might look like this:

While a Twitter script template might look like this:

Since status updates on social media are so quick and short, writing these scripts is incredibly easy. And once you have one written, all of your affiliates will be able to use them right away.

(We should note, however, that it’s good to write more of these as time goes on to avoid looking like you’re spamming.)

Ad Tracking: The Key to Social Media Success

The most underestimated aspect of social media success is easy: ad tracking.

An affiliate who can’t his or her own performance is essentially doing their job blind, whether they’re running AdWords campaigns or promoting your product on Facebook. That’s why it’s essential to have an ad tracking tool that’s always accurate and always up-to-date.

Tracking variables like visitors, leads, and purchases will help your affiliates understand exactly how effective their campaign has been. They can then use this information to gauge whether they need to change their strategy or simply need to invest more money to make more money.

We try to keep things as simple as possible at LeadDyno. So let’s take one kind of ad tracking—Facebook tracking—and break down how it works from the perspective of an affiliate:

Setup a new LeadDyno Tracking Campaign. Under Marketing -> Tracking Campaigns, you can create a new tracking campaign. You’ll get a link that you can then use in your Facebook ads.

Promote on Facebook. Use the link mentioned in the point above as the “URL to promote” on Facebook. This is very important—without the proper link, the tracking won’t be accurate.

Check your results in LeadDyno. Sign in like you normally would, and—voila!—you’ll have the visitors, leads, purchases, and cancellations your Facebook campaign has generated. It’s that simple.

For a more detailed rundown of this process, be sure to check our Facebook Ad tracking page. We’ve also thrown up a few videos to make the whole process easier to understand.

Enhancing Your Affiliates’ Social Media Presence

LeadDyno comes built-in with the tools your affiliates will need to dominate the space of social media. But it will take a little upfront investment on your end to ensure that these tools are ready to put to work. Make sure to create scripts that your affiliates can use in order to make the process as easy on them as possible. After all, your affiliates are human—if you make their job easier, then they’re more likely to sell your product.

That’s not to say that running social media campaigns will be difficult from your position as affiliate program manager. We’ve put together many of the tools you’ll need to get started. Heck, once you sign up, you can easily give out affiliate links that can be transferred to Facebook statuses, Twitter tweets, and LinkedIn updates. You don’t have to be intimidated by social media if you’ve never used it for business purposes.

If you’ve ever been on Facebook and said to yourself, “hey, I almost want to click that,” then you know the power of advertisement via social media. It allows yout product to gain access to entirely new audiences. And oftentimes, these leads come more pre-qualified than most web traffic because sites like Facebook do a good job in showing its users only the ads that will interest them the most. Thanks to social media profiles, advertising has gotten easier and more-effective. And ultimately, more effective also means more cost-effective.